No Other Planet
Utopian Visions for a Climate-Changed World

Investigates the role of hope and fear in our climate-changed world by focusing on various expressions of the utopian imagination.

Mathias Thaler (Author)

9781316516478, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 September 2022

250 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.692 kg

'an original piece of work that should be of considerable interest to scholars within and beyond political theory … Thaler offers us some essential insights into how we might think the daunting future.' Duncan Bell, Centre for the Study of Governance & Society

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. This groundbreaking, timely book examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.

1. Solid Frames and Open Doors
2. Varieties of Utopian Thinking
3. What if: Planet Earth as an actor
4. If Only: Eutopias of Scientific Progress between Techno-Optimism and Anti-Capitalism
5. If this goes on: Hope Lost, Hope Regained
6. Sober Realism and Radical Imagination.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA]